CASE STUDY

EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES

One area of Accenture’s digital transformation is empowering employees to become “digital workers.”

For Accenture’s internal IT organization, the focus is on enabling employees with mobile apps and cloud-based capabilities that provide expanded options to work from anywhere on any device with consistent functionality and experiences.

Accenture IT’s strategy is to deploy capabilities through an agile approach. This approach allows IT to move more quickly to new platforms, capabilities and features as they become available, giving Accenture people the option to adopt them at the pace they are most comfortable with. Getting to this point has been a multiyear journey.

ACCENTURE’S JOURNEY TO OFFICE 365

In 2010, Accenture's internal IT organization made the decision to migrate the company’s critical collaboration capabilities to the cloud. IT selected Microsoft for the ability to partner with a proven, world-class provider, obtain a complete managed service and gain a commitment to minimize impact to end users. The primary focus was on realizing cost savings.

The effort was trailblazing—and highly complex.

By the end of 2012, internal IT had moved more than 250,000 Accenture mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange and nearly 11,300 Microsoft SharePoint sites to a Microsoft Office 365 dedicated tenant cloud service. Additionally, Accenture determined that there was a positive business case to moving to a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS), and subsequently deployed Office 365.

Since 2012, internal IT has continued to optimize Accenture’s cloud environment with a steady pace of improvement initiatives. More recently, the team turned its focus to achieving Accenture-wide scale and speed as well as new security features. Initiatives included the optimization of Accenture’s network for Office 365, moving Exchange and SharePoint to Microsoft’s “vNext” cloud environment, and rolling out new features of OneDrive for Business, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA).

In moving to vNext, Accenture went from dedicated to multi-tenant code base with dedicated infrastructure. The business benefit is the ability to deliver new Office capabilities to Accenture people at speed. Accenture employees now use Skype for Business and are transitioning to Windows 10. New capabilities pop up as they ready. These capabilities support Accenture’s digital worker vision of providing capabilities that are integrated and seamless, increase productivity and enable employees to work from anywhere, anytime. They are providing a foundation for the way people will work in the future.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY, TOMORROW

Accenture’s multiyear journey to Office 365 began with successfully moving the company’s on-premise collaboration infrastructure to the cloud. It was a cost play, resulting in 25 percent savings on Exchange and SharePoint costs and delivered a return on investment in one year. Year over year, operating costs reductions continue at 25 percent.

The journey has since evolved to supporting Accenture’s digital worker vision by providing new capabilities that enable Accenture employees to quickly embrace the latest capabilities for working digitally and productively. New Office 365 capabilities will let employees work in new and leading ways and Accenture is doing all of this at huge scale.

As of March 2017, Accenture had around 417,000 mailboxes on vNext, 13,000 SharePoint sites consuming 140 TB of data. For OneDrive, approximately 437,000 users have been enabled, around 330,000 of them are enabled with Sync client. Accenture has around 344 million files stored, consuming 941 TB of storage. All Accenture users are enabled for Office by default. Current and future capabilities will help teams to stay organized and up to date, better manage user in boxes, present information in useful ways and much more.

Looking ahead, internal IT's focus is to further enable Accenture’s digital worker vision of enhancing productivity by continuing to deploy new capabilities as they are made available.

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